Chapter one is so important that if we’re not careful, we can spin our wheels trying to make it perfect. This isn’t necessarily bad if you’re finished with the first draft and revising. However, if we try to make chapter one perfect before we move on to chapter two, we can easily get stuck in a rut.

The best writing advice I ever received (from my husband) fits perfectly here: Just finish the book. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Your first draft WILL NOT be perfect. That’s why writers spend so much time revising. Writing the first draft is a creative process. At this point, it’s more important to get the story out than to perfect it.

Granted, we don’t want to send our critique partners chapters full of mistakes and typos, so we need to revise as we go to some degree. But that type of revision focuses on grammar and style. Save the perfection of chapter one for last, when you can see the whole arc of the story. Often you don’t even know exactly where the story needs to start until the entire manuscript has been written. Once this is determined, then you can focus on perfecting the hook.

So give yourself permission to write imperfect work. Resist the urge to keep going back to perfect chapter one. Revisions will come, and that’s the time to write the perfect chapter one.

Suzanne Hartmann is the author of PERIL: Fast Track Thriller #1, which released from OakTara last month, and Write This Way: Take Your Writing to a New Level, a blueprint for new authors to guide them through the process of writing and revising a novel.

Suzanne is a homeschool mom and lives in the St. Louis area with her husband and three children. When not homeschooling or writing, she enjoys scrapbooking, reading, and Bible study. On the editorial side, she is a contributing editor with Port Yonder Press and operates the Write This Way Critique Service.

Good advice as often the first chapter may need to be changed after the end is written, especially if you’re like me and don’t know the end when you write the first chapter. Ir it may even need to be scrapped all together. Sometimes writers are writing their way into a novel but much of it is not needed.

Thank you for the congratulations. I am very excited about the release of PERIL, and the good feedback I’m receiving about it.

It’s interesting that this article is reprinted at this specific time when I am starting the sequel to PERIL. I have finally finished chapter one after three revisions that simply weren’t suspenseful enough. I know it’s still not perfect, but I’ve told myself to move on and have started chapter two.

Bryan also shared very good advice about writing chapter one. My agent, Terry Burns, says to consider your first three chapters disposable. This was very true in another of my WIPs. What is now the beginning of chapter one was originally the last half of the second chapter. And the story is SO much better for it.